I’ve never seen this before: H. P. Lovecraft’s Commonplace Book. In his own words:

 This book consists of ideas, images, & quotations hastily jotted down for possible future use in weird fiction. Very few are actually developed plots—for the most part they are merely suggestions or random impressions designed to set the memory or imagination working. Their sources are various—dreams, things read, casual incidents, idle conceptions, & so on.

Two! Hundred! And Twenty-One! Unused story ideas!

Some are weirdly evocative, e.g. # 155, “Steepled town seen from afar at sunset—does not light up at night. Sail has been seen putting out to sea. [Fungi]” 

Others are generic, e.g. # 165,  ”Terrible trip to an ancient and forgotten tomb.”  A few probably weren’t generic at the time, but would be now, e.g. # 181, “Inhabitant of another world—face masked, perhaps with human skin or surgically alter’d human shape, but body alien beneath robes. Having reached earth, tries to mix with mankind. Hideous revelation.” (And # 221 — “Insects or other entities from space attack and penetrate a man’s head and cause him to remember alien and exotic things—possible displacement of personality.” – nicely anticipates M. John Harrison’s career.)

Some play on twentieth-century scientific anxieties, e.g. # 152, “Autonomic nervous system and subconscious mind do not reside in the head. Have mad physician decapitate a man but keep him alive and subconsciously controlled. Avoid copying tale by W. C. Morrow,” and # 36, “Disintegration of all matter to electrons and finally empty space assured, just as devolution of energy to radiant heat is known. Case of acceleration—man passes into space,” or my personal favourite, # 128b, “Dr. insists that the particular amphibian from which man descends is not like any known to palaeontology. To prove it, indulges in (or relates) strange experiment.” Others are more traditional, e.g. # 99, “Salem story—the cottage of an aged witch—wherein after her death are found sundry terrible things.”  Some are – let’s just say tactfully that they speak very distinctively to the concerns of their particular place and time – e.g. # 108, “Educated mulatto seeks to displace personality of white man and occupy his body.”

Some are bizarre notions that it’s hard to imagine ever becoming a story of any kind, e.g.  # 201, “Planets form’d of invisible matter.” Others are straightforward, e.g. # 148, “Vampire dog.” Some are promising but curiously underdeveloped, e.g. # 173 “Idol in museum moves in a certain way.”   

Rather a lot of them read less like story ideas than like cries for help, e.g. # 27, “Life and Death.  Death—its desolation and horror—bleak spaces—sea-bottom—dead cities. But Life—the greater horror! Vast unheard-of reptiles and leviathans—hideous beasts of prehistoric jungle—rank slimy vegetation—evil instincts of primal man—Life is more horrible than death.”

What I think would be a fun summer project would be to get a job as a night nurse in a mental institution, and to sneak into the wards and whisper these horrible fragments into the ears of the patients as they sleep, all 221 of them, over and over, just to see what would happen.

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